Investigating the Affects of Salt in Ice at Room Tempersture

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Investigating the effects of salt in ice at room temperature I am going to investigate how the concentration of salt in ice, effects the rate at which it melts. Ice is water frozen into a solid. The molecules in solid ice may be arranged in different ways, called phases, depending on the temperature and pressure. Usually ice is the phase known as ice Ih, which is the most abundant of the varying solid phases on the Earth's surface. The most common phase transition to ice Ih occurs when liquid water is cooled below 0°C. As a naturally occurring crystalline solid with an ordered structure, ice is considered a mineral. It possesses a regular crystalline structure based on the molecule of water, which consists of a single oxygen atom covalently bonded to two hydrogen atoms, or H-O-H. Many of the physical properties of water and ice are controlled by the formation of hydrogen bonds between adjacent oxygen and hydrogen atoms. It is a weak bond, but is decisive in controlling the structure of both water and ice. In a water molecule, two hydrogen atom are bonded to an oxygen atom share a pair of electrons between them by a covalent bond. In H2O, only two of the six outer-shell electrons of oxygen are used for this purpose, leaving four electrons which are organized into two non-bonding pairs. Salts are ionic compounds that result from the neutralisation reaction of an acid and an alkali. They are composed of an equal number of cations and anions so that the product is electrically neutral. Sodium chloride is an ionic compound with the formula NaCl, representing equal proportions of sodium and chloride. When salt comes into contact with ice, it tends to break apart into individual ions which then interact with the frozen disrupt hydrogen bonds that have formed between ice molecules. This lowers the melting temperature of ice. I hypothesise that the higher the

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